They say that the suburbs are the best place to bring up
kids, but you've got to wonder sometimes whether that's just
an excuse parents use because they want to leave the big
city. In screenwriter Naomi Wallace's vision, the suburbs are
about the worst place for growing up, and they're not all that
great a location for adults either. In her script for "Lawn
Dogs," directed by John Duigan, all of the adults to
whom we are introduced living in Kentucky's Camelot
Gardens are bad news, while the three working-class types
who live in a mobile home and what could best be described
as an enlarged tin can are salt-of-the-earth good guys.

"Lawn Dogs" is as much a fable as it is a straightforward
narrative about a few days in the lives of two unlikely buddies
and the circle of people who surround them. Trent Burns
(Sam Rockwell) is a twenty-one-year-old guy who lives in a
broken-down trailer on the outskirts of Camelot Gardens,
mows lawns, and does tree work for the upscale residents of
the wealthy but improbably pristine community. His clients
include members of the Stockard family: Morton (Christopher
McDonald) and his wife Clare (Kathleen Quinlan) whose
10-year-old daughter Devon (Mischa Barton) takes refuge in
fantasy. It's not that Devon is abused: quite the contrary.
She is patronized by her parents who want her to make
friends, and given gentle advice when she goes out to market
cookies to the community. Eschewing kids her own age, she
becomes pals with the impoverished mower of lawns with
whom he shares a common surgical operation and makes
daily excursions to his trailer which in her eyes is the retreat
of Baba Yaga, a powerful figure in the stories she had heard
from her uncle.

While the adventures of these two unlikely friends follow a
temperate and routine course for a good deal of the movie,
director John Duigan uses a great many opportunities to
come on like a contemporary American Bertolt Brecht in his
aversion to segments of the upper middle class. The owners
of property are as soulless as the acreage they inhabit, using
their spare time to razz, torment and otherwise demonstrate
their disdain for the working class--whom the hapless Trent
represents. At one point, Trent interrupts a backyard steak
barbeque to ask Morton for his fee: Morton short-changes him
ten dollars, kiddingly pointing out, "I gave you two hot dogs,
didn't I?" A snotty blueblood abuses him verbally, asking
what Trent expects to do when he grows up...sarcastically
suggesting that he take a college major in computer design.
Even Nash (Bruce McGill), a security guard who thereby
shares a working-class background with Trent, warns the slim
and sometimes disdainful lad to clear out of Camelot Gardens
by five o'clock each day. Trent is, after all, the sort of person
from whom the denizens ran to Camelot Gardens to escape.

By contrast, Trent is a decent fellow who sends what he can
from his spare income to his aging parents, particularly since
his dad, Jake (Tom Aldredge), lost a lung after being infected
by food poisoning during the Korean War. (The U.S.
government denied all blame for the tragedy--yet another
Brechtian dig at the arrogance of the rich and powerful.)

The central relationship is played out in a predictable style
for the most part, though Duigan successfully employs magic
realism toward the conclusion of the film, dovetailing the
habitual lives of the locals with Devon's favorite fable of Baba
Yaga. While Trent is at first unenthusiastic about the
unannounced visit of the 10-year-old Devon, he is drawn to
her and she to him, the two loners finding comfort with each
other amid a circle of uncomprehending, twisted suburbanites.
While it does nothing for Devon's emotional health that she
discovers her mother in the midst of an affair with a
handsome but loathsome college kid, she takes the incident in
stride as if to say, "What do you expect from people with no
soul?"

The picture, whose funding is provided by the Rank Group
(remember the guy who hammers away in slow motion at
the gong in the logo?), is targeted to a sensitive audience, the
sorts of folks who liked last year's French favorite, "Ma Vie En
Rose." Devon's performance stays properly shy of being
terminally cute, and despite the stylizations with which the
lawn community is photographed, the picture is believable,
mildly amusing, and for the right audience is worthy of
attention.